Well the Texas Democrats returned so the new maps will (probably) be in effect. Understandable that they couldn’t stay away until it was too late, if a bit disappointing. There may be voting rights acts issues, but I doubt that will be a problem with SCOTUS.
California may retaliate, but as I stated in the OP I wanted to keep this thread concentrated on Texas.
Brian
No, the special session is over. Abbot will call another one which I imagine will end up the same.
Texas Republicans are requiring Democratic representatives to sign “permission slips” and agree to a police escort in order to leave the Capitol.
Rep. Nicole Collier (Fort Worth) refuses to sign it, so they’re not permitting her to leave. She expects to be stuck there through at least Wednesday.
It won’t be a problem with SCOTUS because they aren’t diluting votes along strictly racial lines, so technically these won’t be voting rights acts issues. As I noted above, they aren’t disenfranchising people based strictly on race. They are taking advantage of the movement of young Latino men to the Republican party. Take my new presumptive new district, represented by a Democrat who barely won in 2024, as well as the neighboring districts 15 and 27, both currently represented by Republicans. Now all three are likely to be Republican, but not because they are diluting the vote so that we end up with the classic gerrymander of something like 55/45 white vs. minority. It’s because now Latinos are voting R in greater percentages.
ETA: In a sense they are diluting the vote, but it isn’t strictly along racial lines, it’s along age lines. Older Latinos are still voting D, and they tend to predominate in the north and west sides of Corpus Christi. That part of Corpus Christi is being moved to a district (27) that is predominantly white. Without those older Latinos, the addition of the younger Latinos from the south side of Corpus Christi (along with the young Latino men voting R in Harlingen and Brownsville) will be enough to swing district 34 from D to R. So they can argue that Latinos aren’t being disenfranchised because the swing voting group in the new district 34 will be the young Latino males from the south side of Corpus Christi.
So she’s under [state] house arrest? WTF?!
My thought exactly. How is that not false imprisonment?
Controlling women’s fundamental rights, arresting and detaining a minority person who is defiant of authority, and making rules giving themselves powers found nowhere in state or federal law is ‘on brand’ for Texas Republicans led by Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, and about what you’d expect from a state that was among the last states to concede in the American Civil War and the last to actually free enslaved people.
Stranger
So I’ve been looking for an answer to this question and I can’t seem to find anything in the general reporting.
Presumably this fascist order allowing the governor and the attorney general of Texas to place political opponents into law enforcement custody for practicing civil resistance will expire after the vote is taken tomorrow morning. I don’t know this for a fact but it’s my presumption. Even if this is true what is to prevent Abbott or Paxton from simply establishing this as a general order as long as MAGA is in control of the State House and the state of Texas? Democratic politicians in Texas have now acquiesced to law enforcement monitoring of their movements though they have not committed a crime. How does this not become the new normal moving forward? If this works in Texas how does it not spread to other states? If Democrats left the state once to prevent a quorum what’s to say that they won’t do so again in the very near future?
This may be flirting with hyperbole here, but the Gestapo in Nazi Germany was used to enforce ideological conformity among German politicians and the populace at large. It seems a very small leap to go from this to that.
“This is what the voters of Texas want! Who are Democrats to thwart the will of Texas voters?!”
Am I reading too much into this?
You neglected this bit of joy:
So they aren’t just harassing and detaining legislators with presumptive ‘civil arrest’ (unclear under what authority Republican House speaker Dustin Burrows believes that he has to require legislators to sign a statement that commits them to showing up for the Wednesday morning vote or how that in any way justifies supervision and detainment) but are allegedly engaging in what is unambiguously prior restraint on political speech of people freely demonstrating in support of Representative Nicole Collier and in opposition to effectively putting state legislators into custodial supervision without a court order.
The Geheime Staatspolizei (‘Gestapo’) were a federal state security agency under the Nazi regime, but yes, at a state level this is clearly an effort to suppress dissent against an irregular, politically motivated redistricting scheme unambiguously intended as an illegal partisan gerrymandering. It is being done out in plain sight with no shame or any effort to conceal it in the clothing of legitimacy, doubtless pour encourager les autres in suppressing political dissent. Or, as Heather Cox Richardson plainly observes, “On the road to authoritarianism, this is a whole factory of red flags.”
Stranger
Tejano star Bobby Pulido has announced he is running for the House seat in District 15 as a Democrat. This is in one of the gerrymandered districts that runs from the Rio Grande Valley north to just east of San Antonio. It’s about 80% Hispanic and currently represented by a Republican who won her seat due to the trend of young Latino men moving to the right. Running someone like Pulido (and other non-career politicians) could help to counter that. Hopefully more people will decide to do what Pulido is doing.
For what it’s worth, I think he will win by being pushed over the top based on his name. Mark one down in the column for the good guys.